Politics

(PORTLAND, Maine) — Hundreds of people in Portland, Maine, turned up Thursday to watch an unprecedented event unfold in local election history: The winner of an open city council seat was chosen by chance, by drawing a name out of a wooden bowl.

None of the four candidates in the race for the city’s at-large council seat won a majority of the vote in Tuesday’s municipal election. The ranked-choice instant runoff determined that two of the candidates — Brandon Mazer and Roberto Rodriguez — were tied with exactly 8,529 votes each.

In the event of a tie, the city’s charter, which was amended in 2011 to adopt rules for administering ranked-choice voting, governs that “the City Clerk shall determine the winner in public by lot” — meaning the winner is selected at random.

So on Thursday morning, City Clerk Katherine Jones brought an antique wooden bowl from home as people gathered on the plaza outside Portland’s City Hall for the public drawing to determine the winner.

Mazer and Rodriguez, who both agreed to the unique process in advance, verified that their names were printed on identical pieces of cardstock paper. They folded the cards in half and placed them in the bowl, at which point Elections Administrator Paul Riley swirled them around while averting his eyes.

He then held the bowl above Jones’ eye line so she could pull out a card. After displaying it to the candidates, she announced the winner into a microphone — Brandon Mazer. Cheers erupted from the crowd, and the two candidates shook hands and embraced.

“I’m incredibly proud of the campaign we ran, and I really appreciate everyone who came out, and this truly shows that every vote matters,” Mazer, an attorney, told ABC Portland, Maine, affiliate WMTW after the drawing.

Rodriguez promptly submitted an official request for a manual recount, which has been scheduled for Nov. 9. If needed, it will continue on Nov. 10. If the outcome changes from the drawing, Rodriguez will be the winner.

“After such a grueling campaign season, to have it come down to chance was a little bit of a shock,” Rodriguez, a member of the Portland School Board, told WMTW. “But, again, you know, this is what the policy says. This is what we’re governed by, and so here we are today.”

“There is going to be a recount. We’re going to make sure every vote is counted,” he added.

Mazer told the station he supports a recount.

The new councilor will be sworn in on Dec. 6 in what is a historic event for the city.

“This is the first time anyone here can remember having a tie in an election,” Portland spokesperson Jessica Grondin told ABC News. “It is certainly the first time ever having a tie since we’ve used ranked choice voting, which was adopted in 2011.”

The unusual process sparked some criticism on Facebook, with commenters on a video post of the drawing mockingly suggesting using a dartboard, a coin toss or Rock, Paper, Scissors to determine the winner.

Portland isn’t the only place to decide ties by lot. The winner of a hotly contested Virginia House of Delegates seat in a 2017 race was determined by drawing a name out of a ceramic bowl.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department announced Thursday it has sued the State of Texas over its restrictive voting law that went into effect in September.

The complaint argues SB1 violates Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act “by improperly restricting what assistance in the polling booth voters who have a disability or are unable to read or write can receive.”

SB1 affects voters who have a disability by preventing those who assist them from providing help like answering questions on their behalf, confirming voters with visual impairments have properly marked their ballots and responding to any requests they might have about certain ballot translations.

The complaint also accuses the law of violating Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act “by requiring rejection of mail ballots and mail ballot request forms because of certain paperwork errors or omissions that are not material to establishing a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot.”

The complaint filed in civil court asks a judge to prohibit Texas from enforcing the identified provisions in the law.

The DOJ similarly sued Georgia in June, alleging provisions in its new voting law violated Section 2 of the Civil Rights Act.

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(NEW YORK) — Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has convened a new special grand jury to hear evidence in the investigation of former President Donald Trump and his eponymous company, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The new grand jury was convened as the time limit on the original special grand jury is about to expire.

The new six-month special grand jury allows the case to continue beyond Vance’s tenure if needed. He leaves office in early January, when District Attorney-elect Alvin Bragg takes office. In a historic victory, Bragg was elected as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney on Tuesday.

News of the grand jury was first reported by The Washington Post.

The initial grand jury returned an indictment in June against the Trump Organization and its long-serving chief financial officer Allan Weisselberg. Both have pleaded not guilty.

The first indictments returned in the case involved corporate benefits for which, allegedly, no taxes were paid.

“During the operation of the scheme, the defendants arranged for Weisselberg to receive indirect employee compensation from the Trump Organization in the approximate amount of $1.76 million … in ways that enabled the corporate defendants to avoid reporting it to the tax authorities,” the indictment said.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, along with New York Attorney General Letitia James, have also been investigating whether Trump valued his holdings one way when seeking loans and a different way when preparing taxes, manipulation alleged by Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, in 2019 congressional testimony.

Neither the Vance nor James has commented. The Manhattan DA fought a battle for the former president’s tax returns that twice went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump, who has not been charged, has denied wrongdoing and decried the investigation as political.

He told ABC News in July that Weisselberg is a “tremendous man and called the indictment a “disgrace” and “shameful.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Navy has fired the top three leaders who were aboard the attack submarine USS Connecticut when it struck an uncharted sea mountain in the Pacific Ocean in early October.

The commander of the Navy’s Seventh Fleet relieved the commanding officer of the submarine, Cmdr. Cameron Aljilani, the executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Patrick Cashin, and the top enlisted sailor, Master Chief Sonar Technician Cory Rodgers, “due to loss of confidence,” according to a Navy statement.

Though the vessel struck an uncharted sea mountain, Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, commander of Seventh Fleet, determined that the incident could have been prevented.

“Sound judgement, prudent decision-making and adherence to required procedures in navigation planning, watch team execution and risk management could have prevented the incident,” according to the statement.

The three who were fired will be replaced by a new leadership team while the submarine remains in Guam before it makes its way to Bremerton, Washington, for repairs to the hull and interior.

On Oct. 2, the Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine struck an unknown object while underwater, but the Navy did not publicly disclose the incident until after the vessel was close to arriving at the naval base in Guam, where a damage assessment would be made.

A Navy official said at the time that two sailors had suffered moderate injuries and were treated aboard the vessel. Other sailors suffered bumps, bruises and lacerations. There was no damage to the submarine’s nuclear reactor.

While the Navy would not say where the submarine had been operating, China has claimed it was in the South China Sea, where China has made territorial claims not accepted by the United States and the international community.

Last week, a Navy investigation into the incident determined that the submarine had struck an uncharted sea mountain and that the Seventh Fleet commander would determine whether accountability actions might be appropriate.

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(WASHINGTON) — As House Democrats scramble to move forward with President Joe Biden’s landmark infrastructure and social spending legislation, Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday told her deputies behind closed doors that she wants votes on the bills this week — but publicly she declined to commit to any specific timetable.

“I’ll let you know as soon as I wish to,” Pelosi told reporters during her weekly news conference when asked about scheduling what’s become an elusive target for her party.

Congressional Democrats are under new pressure to pass the legislation following Tuesday’s disappointing election results and Biden telling reporters on Wednesday his message to them was: “Get it on my desk.”

“We have to have the votes,” Pelosi said Thursday, indicating her leadership team is still working the numbers behind the scenes.

Pelosi said she was “very unhappy” about missing her previous Oct. 31 deadline for passing the already Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill, stalled as progressives held their votes to continue negotiations on a larger social spending package.

“Did you see the whip count?” Pelosi asked reporters on Thursday. “Because I’ll tell you something about Mr. Clyburn, he keeps it close to the vest.”

Asked if it were possible that she would put only the bipartisan infrastructure bill — or “BIF” — on the floor if the social spending plan or “Build Back Better” bill isn’t ready, Pelosi told reporters: “No.”

“We’re going to pass both bills, but in order to do so we have to have the votes for both bills, and that’s where we are,” she added.

Notably, Pelosi says she does not call votes in the House if she knows she doesn’t have the votes to win.

In an earlier closed-door meeting, Pelosi told her deputies that if the votes are there, they intend to vote on the social spending bill as soon as Thursday night, with votes on the bipartisan infrastructure plan planned for Friday, sources familiar confirmed to ABC News.

“Hopefully we’ll see if we have the votes for BBB tonight and BIF tomorrow morning,” she said, according to a source familiar with the matter.

But there are still several loose ends with the larger social spending or “Build Back Better” package Democrats plan to pass through reconciliation, a process not requiring Republican support but would need all Democratic votes in the Senate — where its fate is unclear with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., having objected to a late addition.

Pelosi announced on Wednesday that Democrats were adding four weeks of paid family and medical leave back to the social spending package, to the praise of progressives, but a move which Manchin said he doesn’t support, raising concerns with the cost.

ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott asked Pelosi what her message is to Manchin, who says he supports paid family leave but not in this package, and Pelosi took an optimistic tone.

“Well, I don’t make a habit of talking to Senator Manchin on the TV. We’re friends. I respect him. He’s a good person. He’s agreed to so much that is in the bill,” Pelosi responded.

“With all the respect in the world for the point of view he represents, I disagree,” she said of his position. “I think that this is appropriate for this legislation. It fits very comfortably with childcare, health care, home care, family medical need, and it has the full support of our caucus.”

Asked by reporters if House Democrats’ inability to pass the legislation ahead of Tuesday’s governor race in Virginia impacted that loss for Democrats, Pelosi said she would have to wait and see the data.

“But I do think as the American people learn more about what we are doing in this legislation for families, for children, for women in the workforce, to save our planet, the rest, it will be very positive. You can’t deny that it would be very positive,” she said. “There’s no question if we the more results we can produce in a way that is people understand in their lives, the better it is,” she added.

Democratic leaders are actively whipping behind the scenes to see if the votes are there and argue to moderates that the social spending plan, expected to cost about $1.75 trillion, will be fully paid for.

The Joint Committee on Taxation said in its latest analysis released Thursday that the new tax provisions included in the social spending plan would raise nearly $1.5 trillion over 10 years — meaning the plan nearly meets Democrats’ mark.

“It’s very solid,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference, noting that the JCT is an “objective” body providing analysis.

JCT’s latest score does not include revenue raised by providing the IRS more money for enforcement or savings from prescription drug pricing changes since those provisions were added in just the last two days.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., also told reporters the JCT score indicates that the bill will be fully paid for when the tax increase, IRS and drug pricing provisions are all taken into account.

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(WASHINGTON) — A researcher who worked with Christopher Steele in assembling Steele’s controversial dossier that contained explosive and unproven claims about former President Donald Trump has been arrested on charges stemming from the special counsel’s investigation of the Russia probe, according to an indictment made public Thursday.

Igor Danchenko, a Russian national living in the U.S., has previously defended his role in gathering information that Steele used in his dossier, including the salacious claim that Russian officials may have had a videotape of Trump watching prostitutes in a hotel room during a 2013 trip to Moscow. Trump has vehemently denied the claim and no evidence has surfaced to support the allegation.

Danchenko has been charged with five separate counts of making false statements to the FBI in interviews where he discussed how he obtained information that he later provided to Steele for inclusion in the dossier.

In the indictment handed down by a federal grand jury and signed by Special counsel John Durham, Danchenko is accused of falsely telling the FBI he had never communicated with an unidentified U.S.-based individual “who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party Politics” about any allegations included in the dossier — whereas the indictment says Danchenko had actually sourced one or more of the allegations to that individual.

The indictment also accuses Danchenko of lying when he told the FBI that he had received an anonymous call in July 2016 from a citizen who he believed to be president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, and who provided him information about possible Trump-Russia ties that Danchenko later passed along to Steele. The indictment alleges that “as he well knew, [Danchenko] never spoke” with the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, and he was lying when he suggested otherwise to the FBI.

The indictment says Danchenko’s lies were material to his interviews with the FBI because their investigation of the Trump campaign “relied in large part” on the Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants against former Trump adviser Carter Page, and that “the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations contained” in the dossier.

The dossier, originally compiled as opposition research against Trump’s presidential candidacy, created an international scandal when it was published by BuzzFeed News 10 days before Trump was sworn into office.

Danchenko was taken into custody Thursday. Details regarding the charges Danchenko is facing were not immediately available.

Last year former Attorney General William Barr declassified documents sent to Congress that showed Danchenko was previously the subject of a counterintelligence investigation examining whether he was an agent of Russia. Danchenko has denied such claims.

Barr also declassified a transcript of an interview Danchenko had with the FBI in January 2017, in which he said many of the most explosive claims he brought to Steele were based on rumors and hearsay.

An attorney for Danchenko did not immediately respond for a request for comment. Steele declined to comment to ABC News when asked for a response to Danchenko’s arrest.

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(WASHINGTON) — With the nation’s top public health officials as their audience, Senate Republicans on Thursday aired complaints about a new wide-reaching vaccine mandate for large businesses being implemented by the Biden administration.

“I’m just telling you it’s a hard sell to tell people who have had COVID that they’re now under a mandate — a mandate by the federal government — to be vaccinated. I think you’ve got an extremely tough sell,” Sen. Richard Burr, the top Republican on the Senate Health Committee, told the heads of the Biden White House COVID response team, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky and chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a hearing.

The new mandate, announced in September but finalized Thursday, will apply to nearly 100 million U.S. workers and require them to either get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID tests. The mandate will take effect on Jan. 4, after the holidays.

Both Fauci and Walensky were supportive of the mandate, pointing to 745,000 American deaths and thousands more each week, the vast majority of which are among the unvaccinated.

Burr was one of several Republicans who made the case during the hearing that unvaccinated Americans who have had COVID-19 should be exempt from the new mandate because they would now have “natural” immunity to the virus, an argument made by business organizations that oppose the mandate.

While studies have shown that people still carry immune response to the virus after recovery, it’s not clear how long that immunity lasts and it doesn’t appear to be as robust as immunity from vaccination. One recent CDC study found that people with “natural” immunity through infection were five times more likely to develop COVID-19 compared to people who were fully vaccinated, something Wallensky and Fauci pointed out.

Still, Burr argued that health care professionals were already suffering from worker shortages and couldn’t afford to lose more people because they refused to comply with mandates. Under the mandate for health care workers, which applies to any place receiving federal funding through Medicare or Medicaid, workers are required to get vaccinated without an option to do weekly tests instead.

“You start doing this to people, Medicare, Medicaid providers, community health centers, we’re not going to have the people to surge,” Burr said, referring to surge responses to states that need more doctors and nurses when COVID cases spike.

He called the decision not to allow for “natural” immunity qualifiers “confusing.”

“There’s every reason to believe that people can look at this and say, ‘What the hell are you guys doing? What are you judging this based on?’ It’s not common sense and it’s certainly not science.”

Walensky said the data on how natural immunity lasts is “murkier” but the CDC can track with certainty how long vaccines work, and referenced the recent study showing more infections in people who have had COVID than in those who are vaccinated.

“CDC recommendations suggest that you have more both more durable and robust and known immune response if you are vaccinated after you’ve been previously infected, and those are our recommendation,” Walensky said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, also told the public health officials that she was worried about worker shortages.

“When we’re talking about vaccine and vaccine hesitancy, we need to be talking to those who are putting in place some of these standards that in my state are causing an extraordinary issue and problem within our workforce,” Murkowski said.

Both Fauci and Walensky defended the mandates, which the Biden administration hopes will stifle COVID cases that have disrupted everything from education systems to supply chain and the economy.

“We’ve had 745,000 deaths from this disease and we’re continuing to have about 75,000 cases every single day,” Walensky said.

“We know the most disruptive thing in our workforce is to have a COVID outbreak and to have workers in that workforce come down with COVID infection, severe disease, and in some cases death. Vaccination as we’ve seen, decreases your risk of infection by sixfold, decreases your risk of hospitalization and death by tenfold even during this delta surge. So there’s absolutely a public health priority to get people vaccinated and to continue the important prevention and mitigation strategies including masking to keep them safe,” she said.

Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, asked Fauci, “If we do have a mandate, will it save lives? And is there an estimate of, of the number of lives that might be saved by virtue of having our private companies that have over 100 employees, either having their employees receive a vaccination or get a weekly test? If that occurs, will it save lives and you have an estimate of the number of lives that might save?”

Fauci said he did not have a model on hand, but had “a very firm and confident answer” to the first question.

“We know that vaccines absolutely save lives. And we know that mandates work,” he said.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration is ordering federal agencies to fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in software and hardware that hackers have been known to exploit, according to a new government directive released Wednesday.

The first-of-its-kind directive, issued by the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, includes a list of vulnerabilities “that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise” with technical specifics that agency leaders are required to review and address within 60 days. Some areas will require a more immediate fix, according to CISA.

“Cybersecurity threats are among the greatest challenges facing our Nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Wednesday. “Organizations of all sizes, including the federal government, must protect against malicious cyber actors who seek to infiltrate our systems, compromise our data, and endanger American lives.”

U.S. information systems have fallen victim to an increasing number of cyber attacks in recent years targeting schools, hospitals and critical infrastructure.

A 2020 cyber intrusion into the U.S. company SolarWinds, which sells software to the federal government, was not discovered until months after malicious code was injected into a routine software update. The discovery sent government officials scrambling to determine if their systems were compromised.

Last July, the U.S. and its allies condemned China for a cyber assault on Microsoft email servers and said hackers supported by the Chinese government had carried out ransomware or cyber-extortion attacks for millions of dollars. The Chinese-backed hackers were able to string together multiple, lower-level vulnerabilities to exploit Microsoft systems, according to CISA.

The new directive aims to address this hacker strategy by restructuring its classifications for vulnerabilities and establishing a working catalog of flaws that need to be addressed.

“This directive will significantly improve the federal government’s vulnerability management practices and degrade our adversary’s ability to exploit known vulnerability,” CISA Director Jen Easterly told lawmakers at a House Homeland Security hearing Wednesday.

The directives do not apply to the Department of Defense or U.S. intelligence agencies.

The order is one of the most expansive federal cybersecurity mandates in U.S. history and it’s the first requirement of governmentwide fixes that spans both online and internal systems, according to the Wall Street Journal.

At the House hearing Wednesday, Republican Rep. Clay Higgins expressed concern the government was not taking enough proactive, offensive steps to defend critical infrastructure.

“Why are we not lighting these criminals up with a counter strike cyber attack?” Higgins asked.

“It is important to bring transgressors to justice,” National Cyber Director Chris Inglis responded.

“Equally important is a campaign that covers all the ways that we can thwart their efforts,” Inglis said. “We need to begin with increased resilience and robustness in the technology, in the skills of our people, in the roles and responsibilities.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday denied reports that his administration was planning to pay migrant family members separated by the Trump administration up to $450,000 per person.

“That’s not going to happen,” Biden said in response to a question about the plans at a press conference Wednesday.

Biden called the reported plans “garbage” and “not true.”

The cash settlements, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, could have totaled up to $1 million per family, the paper said. ABC News confirmed last week that some officials had considered payments but reported that the exact dollar amounts had not yet been determined and could change.

The ACLU responded to Biden’s comments with a statement saying the president would be “abandoning a core campaign promise” if he doesn’t make good on the payments.

“President Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department as it carefully deliberated and considered the crimes committed against thousands of families separated from their children as an intentional governmental policy,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement. “But if he follows through on what he said, the president is abandoning a core campaign promise to do justice for the thousands of separated families.”

As a candidate, Biden described the separation of migrant families under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance policy” as “criminal.”

The Biden administration has identified nearly 4,000 children who were separated from their families, according to the latest report from the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families. The task force has reunified 50 families, with 50 more in the process of being reunified. About 2,100 more were reunified under court orders with the help of nongovernmental organizations.

As of September, the task force was aware of 1,727 children who had still not been reunited with their parents.

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(NEW YORK) — Voters in New Jersey headed to the polls on Tuesday to weigh in on Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s reelection bid. New Jersey and Virginia were the only two states with a gubernatorial election in an off year, and all eyes were on them as the first official test for President Joe Biden at the ballot box.

But as of 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the New Jersey governor’s race was still too close to call.

Murphy and former member of the state assembly Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican nominee, were swapping leads in early vote totals, but as heavily-Democratic counties processed mail-in ballots Wednesday afternoon, Murphy widened his lead over Ciattarelli. Still, vote totals remained outstanding.

Leading up to the election, Murphy comfortably led in public polling, but the race was still seen as a referendum on Biden’s agenda.

Democrats nationwide have attempted to equate all Republicans with former President Donald Trump, but Republicans deployed that same tactic as they tied Democrats to Biden, whose poll numbers began to sink over the summer with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the spread of the delta variant and congressional negotiations over his agenda.

National Democrats, while more concerned with Virginia, swung through New Jersey to stump for Murphy, as well. He’s hosted former President Barack Obama, First lady Jill Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Although New Jersey is reliable for Democrats when it comes to presidential and Senate elections, if he wins, Murphy would be the first Democratic governor reelected by New Jerseyans in more than 40 years.

Counties are colored red or blue when the % expected vote reporting reaches a set threshold. This threshold varies by state and is based on patterns of past vote reporting and expectations about how the vote will report this year.

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